We buy trucks in Cameron

Lemon Springs Quarry records 28 employees and sits 6.23 miles from the town centroid. The road network around it is a small one: 108 structures within ten miles, where the metropolitan circles in this state run past five hundred.

Those two figures together describe a particular kind of place. A substantial working operation, and not much road around it to work with — which is what a rural pit supplying a wide area looks like from the data rather than from the window.

Of those 108 structures, 9 are rated below legal loads, and the nearest of them is 5.02 miles out. Only nine rows in this state put more distance between a pit and its closest restricted crossing. On a small network the restrictions are few and they are not on the doorstep.

That second row is Spout Springs Pit, and it is carried as a surface operation working industrial sand under R. L. Bradsher Contracting, Inc., with 3 employees. It is one of five industrial-mineral rows in this state.

Sand is a different trade from crushed stone and it moves differently. It is a bulk commodity that loads and tips like aggregate, but the customers are not the same customers and the runs are not the same runs. A truck that hauled out of a sand pit is not the same working history as one that hauled crushed stone, even where the body on the back is identical.

Three employees is a registration figure rather than a workforce, so nothing about the equipment there is inferred from it. What is established is the commodity and the operator, and those are enough to say the two pits filed to this town are in two different businesses.

Both of them load under the same statute, and it is more generous on the open road than any other we hold on file.

N.C.G.S. section 20-118 sets 20,000 lb on a single axle and 38,000 lb on a tandem, with gross weight varying by axle-group distance up to 80,000 lb. The tandem figure is the one to notice. Every other state we have read carries 34,000 lb there, so North Carolina allows four thousand pounds more on a tandem than Georgia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Alabama, Missouri, Ohio or Pennsylvania. On a dense load that is the limb that binds, which makes an identical 80,000 lb ceiling mean more here than it does elsewhere.

The same section grants a ten per cent tolerance on axle-group weights, and then writes down exactly what the tolerance does not reach: not the single-axle limit, not the tandem limit, not the 80,000 lb gross, not a posted bridge, and not the interstate system. It adds that no tolerance on those axle figures shall be granted administratively or otherwise. So it attaches to the axle-group table and to nothing else.

There is also an agricultural exemption with a distance on it. A vehicle carrying agriculture, dairy or crop products from a farm or holding facility to a processing plant, feed mill or market is outside the weight limits within 150 miles of the point of origination.

N.C.G.S. § 20-118. Information, not legal advice, and only as current as the date the statute was last read for this batch.

The tightest crossing a commercial vehicle could use near Lemon Springs Quarry is rated about 18 US tons gross. That is a rating for the crossing rather than a payload, and a legal 80,000 lb truck grosses forty, so it takes one only part loaded. Whether it falls on a route anybody drives depends on where the loads go, and the data does not say.

Beyond the weight table, the paperwork comes down to that one sentence.

Everything after it is a fix rather than a category. A lost title has a counter replacement. Where none exists there is a bonded route. Both are ordinary, and neither stops a sale.

Two North Carolina rules are drafted differently enough from the rest to matter here. The state brands a vehicle salvage where the cost of repairs, parts and labour, exceeds seventy-five per cent of its fair retail market value — and it applies that test whether or not an insurer has declared a total loss. Several states make an insurer’s decision a route into the definition. North Carolina writes the insurer out of it.

The second is a six-year line, and it decides the process rather than the test. A vehicle up to and including six model years old goes through preliminary and final inspections by the Division’s Enforcement Section before it can be retitled. One more than six model years old may be retitled without inspection, and the cost of replacing the air bag restraint system is left out of the seventy-five per cent sum. The same repair bill therefore counts against a five-year-old truck and not against a seven-year-old one.

N.C.G.S. § 20-4.01 and § 20-71.3. Information, not legal advice.

All of that iron is iron we buy. Dump trucks and aggregate haulers off Lemon Springs Quarry. Sand haulers and bulk tippers off the Spout Springs pit. Day cabs and road tractors on the runs out. Box trucks and straight trucks, flatbeds, rollbacks, tankers, service bodies, and the work trucks and pickups that go out with a crew.

Whatever you drive, the offer doesn’t change. We buy all of them.

• Does it have to run?No. It does have to be complete — if the engine, transmission, doors, rear ends, drive shafts, wheels or anything under the hood have been removed, we can’t buy it. Rust is not a disqualifier.
• The engine is out of it. Is that different?Yes, and that is the line. A tired engine is fine; an engine that has been pulled and sold means we can’t buy the truck.
• What about the title?We need one unless the truck is old enough that it never had one. A lost title has a counter replacement; where none exists there’s a bonded route. Neither stops a sale.
• It hauled sand rather than stone. Different to you?Not to whether we buy it. Sand and crushed stone load and tip much the same way, and we ask what it carried because bodies wear differently under different commodities, not because one is a better answer than the other. A Spout Springs Pit truck and a Lemon Springs Quarry truck are both trucks we buy.
• Small town, and you are not nearby. How does this work?Usually without a visit at all: we buy it remotely and arrange the tow. We also come to you and drive it away, or come to you and tow it, and you can bring it to us if that is easier.

That second question is the one small towns ask first, and behind it the reasons have nothing to do with Lemon Springs or Spout Springs.

Retiring. A medical that went the wrong way. A contract that ended and left one machine too many in the yard. Sometimes the truck is simply sitting, and every month it sits is another month of insurance on something that isn’t turning a wheel.

Most of those aren’t happy reasons, and we don’t treat them like they are. Somebody wants a straight answer and the truck gone by the end of the week. That’s what we’re here for.